I use Microsoft Security Essentials, available free through Microsoft. I originally went with it after finding that ESET, which I had used on several machines for a while, required a minimum 1.66 GHZ processor, and a new Sony P-series netbook had a mere 1.33 GHZ Atom processor. A local Sony tech guy said Microsoft Security Essentials was as good as Symantec, and I felt he was probably honest in that assessment, as he could have sold me a Sony-branded security suite that contained Symantec.

Then, during a recent computer security class taught as part of in-service training through my employer, a large government entity, our IT security guy said Microsoft Security Essentials was an excellent program.

The best thing about this system I like is that it works seamlessly with all the other Microsoft Windows products/components. We now use it on all of our machines.

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Hmm, Trusted Reviews has flagged this "Which" report which suggests that some anti-virus companies are not behaving in a manner you'd expect if you accept their special upgrade offers ahead of the time your current subscription expires. Both Symantec and AVG are mentioned adversely so be warned.

I have migrated completely over to MSE on all my PC's now away from AVG (free). I got sick of the constant adverts, upgrade requests plus a botched signature upgrade the other day.
I am careful where i surf so even if MSE is not so effective i doubt if the risk is any higher.

As a result of this thread, I've re-installed MSSE on my main box. Had one incoming trojan via e-mail so far so basically nothing around still. Hasn't been as intrusive as in the past so I've left it on for now...

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G Data's Internet Security 2011 is still on trial here. It's poor integration with Outlook continues to be a frustration as there's no way of adding email addresses to the Whitelist or Blacklist from within Outlook: I have to open G Data, select the Email tab, click Change Settings, click the "Spam" or "No Spam" tab, select an email and then click the "To Whitelist" or "To Blacklist" button and then click OK. That's just ridiculous compared to Kaspersky's provision of a Spam/No Spam Outlook toolbar but with Kaspersky causing those occasional two minute computer startup delays there's no way that's going back on my computer. I'm also not too happy about G Data forcing me to be over-reliant on Whitelists/Blacklists, particularly as it was flagging a number of perfectly genuine news feed emails as Spam initially. So the bottom line is that while it is undoubtedly amongst the best at detecting threats that extra percentage point comes at too high a price. Looks like I'll be running another trial program in a couple of weeks time.

On the wider point of surfing carefully, while it's certainly possible to avoid sites which are quite likely to attack one's computer it's never really possible to be sure of not visiting such a site simply because so many web pages these days include third party content. Not so long ago I visited a perfectly respectable site which had inadvertently accepted an Ad from a third party which fired up a message box telling me my computer was infected. That message box was of the "System" variety which meant that the Firefox tab couldn't be closed until the message box was closed. Clicking the Cancel button initiated an attempt to download hostile content. In the end I had to force closure of Firefox from the Task Manager and start it up again in Safe mode so that it wouldn't reload the "infected" web page. While this wasn't a covert attack it neatly illustrates that frames within a web page that have come from third parties, usually as adverts, are a potential security risk on any site that accepts them. The reason the web-master hadn't spotted the problem in the first instance was that the attack only happened infrequently.

I did a little research and briefly considered Trustport (another twin engine option) but then read a CNET review suggesting that while it might be pretty good at identifying threats it might not have been so good at preventing them. Similar points were levelled at G Data's offering so, despite bad experiences in the past with failed Symantec updates and despite my warning a few posts up from here, I decided to trial Symantec's offering.

The first surprise was to find out that they are now calling themselves Norton again - I remember when they were called Norton the first time around and their products were liberally sprinkled with pictures of Peter Norton. Names don't really matter, except to marketing geeks, so I started the process of downloading a trial. I very nearly backed away at the first hurdle as Norton demand your credit card for their free trial so that they can automatically convert it into a paid subscription after thirty days without further action from the "trialee". A marketing practice I had hoped had disappeared with the Reader's Digest.

But both CNET and PC Pro magazine rate the product highly so I persisted. Another glitch arose when the web form decided that I didn't know how to spell the name of my village but I got around that by substituting spaces for hyphens. After "no payment" was collected from my credit card I was alllowed to download the "Downloader". At this point I cut away and uninstalled G Data and rebooted. I then ran the downloader which downloaded and ran the Norton™ Internet Security 2011 installer. All went well until I tried to "Sign In" during activation at which point the program decided that the password I'd created only minutes previously was invalid. Norton emailed me a new password, when I exercised that option, which I was able to use to activate the trial and I then used that password to log into my Norton account and create a permanent password. At that point I was also able to cancel the automatic "renewal" so that the trial could expire without further action from me.

But, all those niggles aside, I'm very favourably impressed. I had to move the Norton toolbar that appeared in Outlook (the same sort of toolbar that was so badly lacking with G Data) to a more convenient location and I also disabled the non-moveable toolbar that appeared in Firefox and, IMHO, wasted far too much screen real-estate. A quick look at the Norton settings shows it has already whitelisted my Outlook address book contacts (something else that G Data didn't do) and I have to say that at first glance the various setting panels are easily reached and settings are easily configured as needed.

I'll leave it running for a few days but already I'm pretty certain this will be the package for me as I'm not convinced by some of the Microsoft Security Essentials "script" test results. Oh, and the reason I wanted to cancel that automatic "renewal" at the expiration of the trial, apart from the matter of principle, is that Norton are currently offering a very significant saving on a 3PC 1 year subscription, something I very much doubt will still be available in thirty days time.

Update: Norton™ Internet Security 2011's reputation here is still intact. I let it do a full system scan (fun watching all eight CPU cores active in Task Manager) which it completed in very good time. It found and removed a few tracking cookies and also, more seriously, the Trojan "ByteVerify" (description) downloaded as part of a Java package. It hadn't ever been launched so no harm done but clearly it's something that got missed during download either by Kaspersky or G Data during their tenure as protectors of my computer.

As some might have guessed I might from my previous post I've now settled on and paid for a year's subscription to Norton™ Internet Security 2011. I could have run the trial version for a lot longer but with 40% off the regular price at the moment there didn't seem to be any point. As before the downloader did it's stuff in that it saved the installation files (in a location of its own choosing) and created a number of shortcuts. What it didn't do, however, was to actually run any sort of installation.

That left me wondering what to do next but when I looked at the downloaded files I found one called "downloadinfo.txt" and in that was the product key which I then copied and pasted into the already running trial version of Norton™ Internet Security 2011. Not a particularly user friendly way of doing things. Whether I could have delayed using the product key until nearer the end of the trial and still got the full 366 days of protection added on to the end of it I'll never know. To be honest it didn't occur to me to try and while I might have saved myself about £5 if doing so had worked I'm just as happy to have got the task of replacing Kaspersky over and done with.

Thanks for that heads-up. While buying online was definitely cheaper this time around (3PC 1 year licence was £30 against the Amazon UK price of £38) I'm now going to cancel my automatic renewal with Norton/Symantec and set myself a reminder in 50 weeks to check the online vs. Amazon pricing. Unless Norton are offering a similar discount it will definitely be cheaper to buy via Amazon (and you get a CD-ROM as well) and I'll also get to give Gordon a (very) small Christmas present by using a link from our Affiliates page.

According to the Inquirer Microsoft has updated Security Essentials to version 2. I can't find any reference to this on the Microsoft site, though I guess t must be documented somewhere, but if you want to give it a try it's available for Windows XP, Vista and 7 here.

Quite coincidentally I decided to ditch Kaspersky on my Media PC last night. It had never given any trouble on that machine apart from a well documented glitch where it eats up most of the available processor cycles for a fraction of a second every midnight, but as I'm not renewing with Kaspersky I thought I'd give Security Essentials a run on that machine. It is very rarely used for browsing so I didn't need to waste a "Norton Internet Security" licence for that machine and I'm happy to report that Microsoft Security Essentials 2 installed and ran without a problem. In the Media PC context I was particularly pleased to find an option where you can throttle the scanning engine down (I chose 10%) when it's performing a complete scan of the host computer.

I am very curious about the performance of MSE 2.0, a pity it was released after all the tests have been performed on MSE 1, but for now I am already satisfied by Gdata 2011 for the next year or so (think I have 24 months license).

Well, they changed the skin of MSE, it's now black-ish instead of blue-ish. also, it did not update automatically, and did not find an update when I manually invoked the update through the menu.

When I downloaded MSE again, the installer looked extremely similar to the "menu update" though....

The install just finished, and I have 2 options: reboot the PC, or close window. If I click the close window button, it gives me an alert box with the option to.....*drumroll* reboot the pc, or close the window. When I click the "close window" button, it goes back to the previous screen....

**** like this, Microsoft

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